On this day in 1469, the great Niccolo Machiavelli was born. The Hundred and One Dalmatians author Dodie Smith was born in 1896. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was born in 1898. Bing Crosby, who for some reason I just hate, was born in 1903. Femme fatale from The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor was born in 1906. And magician Doug Henning was born in 1947.

Pete Seeger is 94 today! Physicist Steven Weinberg is 80. Singer Frankie Valli is 79. TV pitchman Ron Popeil is 78. The younger of the evil Koch duo, David Koch is 73. And comedy writer Ben Elton is 54.

But the day belongs to The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, who was born on this day back in 1933. I don’t know that much about him, but his music has been profoundly important to me. Let’s just listen to him with Bobby Byrd doing several songs on Italian TV in 1971:

Happy birthday James Brown!

I’ve been sick and so I’ve been re-watching some movies. Last night, I put on Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. At one point, Mr. Pump says that Moist Von Lipwig has killed many people. Lipwig counters that he never even drew a sword. Pump responds, “You have stolen, embezzled, and swindled. You have ruined businesses and destroyed lives. When banks fail, it’s not bankers who starve. In a thousand small ways, you have hastened the deaths of many. You did not know them. You did not see them bleed. But you snatched bread from their mouths.”

There is a conservative reading of this, of course. It’s the old “get tough on the criminals” line. But that isn’t what Terry Pratchett is saying. The whole of Going Postal is a radical critique of free market idolatry. The point is this: economic crime kills. But in our system, we don’t talk about that. We pretend that physical and economic harm are different. If a criminal tied a victim to a chair and let him starve to death, that would be considered murder. If the same criminal merely prevented a victim from having a job so he could buy food, that would not be considered murder. (See my article Property Rights for a discussion of the myth of freedom in a modern economy.)

We know that poor people have much lower life expectancies than rich people. In the upper half of the income distribution, people live about 5 years longer than people in the lower half. This means that our economic system hastens the deaths of many. When a venture capitalist fires hundreds of manufacturing workers, he lowers the life expectancies of those workers. Let’s suppose he does that to 1,200 workers and takes an average of one month of life away from each. That’s a hundred years of life. That’s a lot more life than your average murder takes away from his victim. Yet we don’t even see what the venture capitalist does as a crime, much less punish him for it.

I realize it is more complicated than this. And I am not calling for a communist revolution. In fact, I am actually a big proponent of a market system. My problem is not with the venture capitalist. He is just doing what society tells him to. The problem is the society itself. We live in a rich nation. If we wanted to, we could provide everyone with a base level of support. There is no reason why Americans need to feel insecure about their futures. But it’s a choice. And the choice that we’ve made is to allow some to become insanely rich while others live under the eaves of the downtown library.

And where might that money come from? I’ve written about this a lot because I think the most important issue we face as a country is economic inequality. The explosion of inequality is the direct and indirect result of government policy. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in the years from 1917-1981, the bottom 90% of income earners received 69% of the gains from productivity increases. In the years 1981-2012, the bottom 90% of income earners received 4% of the gains from productivity increases.

An indication of this can be seen in CEO compensation data from Bloomberg. In 1950, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies made 20 times what the average employee at their firm made. (Average, not minimum.) By 1980, the number had risen to 42. Today, it is 204. This is not all about taxes. There are plenty of other ways that the government over the last 60 years has made owners rich at the expense of the poor. One of the most important is the way that Reagan basically abolished all labor law and allowed unions to be all but destroyed in the private economy. (And Democrats have done nothing but help that along since then.)

Economic crime kills. Legal economic activity kills. The government should do something about that. But as income inequality has skyrocketed, the government has only become more beholden to the rich. It is far more interested in seeing to it that the rich can transfer their wealth to their kids without paying taxes than that the poor can live with a modicum of dignity.

Data were taken from The Young Turks May Day video.

Who knew Stephen Fry was so smart?

Well, I guess we all did…

This is a remarkable catch by Melissa Harris-Perry on The Rachel Maddow Show tonight. Apparently, one of the scenarios you can play at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in their “decision room” is Hurricane Katrina. But it isn’t about helping the drowning and starving people. It is about whether to send in troops to the stop the looting.

This is about what I expect from a presidential library. It has only been in the past couple of years that the Nixon library has been anything close to truthful about Watergate. Eventually, the new Bush library will tell the truth. But as long as he’s alive, it will be all lies and apologia. Because we can’t hurt Bush’s feelings. He’s rich and powerful. We only disregard the feelings of the poor and weak.

Catherine the Great was born on this day in 1729. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was born in 1885. Benjamin Spock was born in 1903. And the great Indian director Satyajit Ray was born in 1921.

David Suchet is 67 today. And Elizabeth Berridge is 51.

But by a nose, the day belongs to the great lyricist Lorenz Hart who was born on this day in 1895. With Richard Rodgers, he wrote such great songs as “Blue Moon,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and “My Funny Valentine.”

Happy birthday Lorenz Hart!

I just watched what I think of as a deeply flawed but interesting documentary Puppet. It follows the Dan Hurlin production of a puppet play about the photographer Mike Disfarmer. My problem with the film is that it isn’t focused. It is kind of about the theatrical backstage, kind of a about the state of puppetry, and kind of about Disfarmer. Without a doubt, Disfarmer is the most interesting of the subjects.

He was a loner portrait photographer in a rural Arkansas town during the first half of the last century. Long after he died, he gained great acclaim for his work. It is stark without a hint of sentimentality. I urge you to check out this work at the official print website where you can buy his prints for $800 a piece. Or you could buy the book Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints for about $40.

The play that Dan Hurlin produced is called Disfarmer. Parts of it are shown in film, but of course, I haven’t seen the whole thing. It tells the story of Disfarmer’s last week alive. And during that time, his body shrinks. That’s rather interesting because it isn’t especially something you could do live with an actual human being. But other than that, it struck me as interesting but not really entertaining. That’s sad, because Disfarmer is a fascinating character.

A lot of the film is dedicated to various puppeteers justifying their art form. The one counter to this was David Sefton, the Artistic Director of UCLA Live. He complained that too much puppetry is for its own sake. Instead, he felt that puppets should only be a tool in telling stories. It may surprise you to learn that I completely agree with him. And that was well on display in the production of Disfarmer. Rather than start with the idea that they want to tell a particular story, the story they are trying to tell is limited to the techniques they want to use. To me, the subject matter begged to be done as a one-man play. I don’t necessarily mean something like Hal Holbrook or James Whitmore. Looking at what Hurlin’s group did, I thought they caught the mood of Krapp’s Last Tape, but didn’t seem to catch its emotional core.

As much as I love puppets, I have my own philosophy about them. Fundamentally, they allow a storyteller to cut costs. When Orson Welles did Dr. Fausus, he used puppets for the Seven Deadly Sins. That makes perfect sense. These characters are only on stage for about a minute each. Should one use seven actors with seven extra costumes as well as costume (and perhaps make-up) changes and generally greater logistical complexity back stage? But in most puppet productions, each puppet requires multiple controllers. I still can’t get my head around that: why would a producer use the talents of a half dozen experienced puppeteers just to create one character on stage.

Another issue I have with this kind of puppet use is that I don’t think it uses the strengths of the medium. I’ve run into this with my scripts for “The Post-Postmodern Comedy Hour.” One of the primary characters is a puppet. There are lots of reasons that I want to get rid of the puppet, most especially the enormous technical challenges. Unfortunately, the character is a kind of Peter Pan thing: he refuses to grow up. As a puppet, he is vaguely sympathetic; as a human, he’s just a dick. And that more than anything is why I like puppets: they don’t need to have realistic personalities—they can be stretched just about any way you like.

I suspect that the play Disfarmer would have been enjoyable to watch. I just think that the producers are going a very long way out of their way in order to come back a short distance correctly. As for the film itself, it didn’t make me want to learn more about the serious puppetry business. And it made me appreciate ventriloquists more.

Earlier this week, Ross Douthat wrote about the debate that has been going on between Ezra Klein and Ben Domenech about whether or not conservatives actually have an alternative to Obamacare. Douthat thus gave us, The Republican Health Policy Trainwreck. But don’t let the title fool you, it is basically an apologia for the Republicans. His basic point is: “I think the answer is pretty straightforward: a conservative alternative or alternatives, yes; an alternative that Republican lawmakers are ready to vote for, no.”

He claims there is a big rift between conservative policy wonks and conservative politicians. He points to a number of conservative policies that the think tanks have come up with but which the Republican Party will have none of. Oh well, Douthat is a conservative, so I guess he is allowed a little delusion. The fact is that this isn’t even close. As you may remember, the individual mandate (Obamacare) was a conservative policy idea. Once it became politically viable, all the conservatives turned against it—not just the politicians. Thus, I can’t see the new conservative ideas as anything other than a cover for being against any extant policies.

Most of the article is about how Eric Cantor tried to take discretionary money and give it to one of the under-funded high risk pools. And he couldn’t even get the other Republicans to go along with that, even though it was really just a way to make it harder for the government to help poor people. And that’s my point: even the “reasonable” conservatives are only willing to do something on healthcare if it can be used to more generally hurt government services. Regardless, these ideas are not alternatives to Obamacare, they are just Trojan horses meant to destroy the program. (BTW: the supposed alternatives are either changes around the edges of the pre-Obamacare system or ridiculous notations that “the free market” will fix everything. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t be stuck with Obamacare.)

Recently, a study was released that looked at outcomes of a sample of people who qualified for Medicaid in Oregon. Because it was underfunded, those who got it were picked by lottery. In the two years of the study, they found that healthcare outcomes weren’t significantly different for the two groups but financial outcomes were. There are a couple of things to note here. Those on Medicaid received far better preventive treatment. The effects of that treatment will generally be seen over a longer time period than two years. What’s more, the financial aspect is huge. I currently owe almost $200,000 for a hospital stay I had five years ago when I was employed with a company that promised health insurance next month for three years. Anyway, to my mind, the study shows that Medicaid is at minimum a great thing.

But not all people think that. Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt over at The Incidental Economist report on how conservatives are greeting the study:

This is what the “reasonable conservatives” like Ross Douthat don’t want to admit: their allies (and maybe they themselves) don’t want healthcare reform. As always, they think that helping the poor is bad because: (1) it disincentivizes the poor to work; and (2) the poor are undeserving because they are morally inferior. And, to use a rhetorical trick that I learned from Matt Yglesias, that’s fine. If they want to hate poor people for being poor they should go for it. What they shouldn’t do is pretend that they are just trying to better serve the poor with all their great ideas for healthcare reform.

Paul Waldman wrote an excellent article over at The American Prospect, House of Representatives Now a Scene from “Life Of Brian.” It is based upon a Politico article that reported that the House Republicans are divided into two factions. Not moderates and conservatives. No, that would be too reasonable. One of the factions is comprised of hardcore “lower taxes and cut spending” types. The other is comprised of hardcore “outlaw abortion and kills the gays” types. And they do not like each others. “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judean People’s Front!”

The movie Life of Brian is not particularly about religion. It is mostly about extremists—in particular, revolutionary groups. My favorite part of the movie is the scene where they discuss what the Romans ever did for them. “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” That’s right out of a Tea Party movement. “What has the government ever done for us?”

What Waldman is getting at without explicitly saying so is that the Republicans have become a revolutionary party. They are not interested is governing. They think the entire system is invalid; they don’t want to reform it; they want to destroy it. Generally, they don’t succeed because people are smart enough not to give them power. But when they do it is very bad. When the Nazis gained control of the German government, almost the first thing they did was dissolve the parliament and make Hitler dictator. The point is that half measures don’t matter to these kinds of people. It is all or nothing. So until they have complete power, they have nothing to do but out-purity each other.

Waldman started his article with a claim that is music to my ears:

This is one of my pet peeves too. No one would ever say, “My drain is clogged; get me someone who knows nothing about plumbing!” But I think that Waldman is wrong to think that the dysfunctional Republican Party is the result of idiot outsiders who have taken over the party. Usually, there are norms that stop zealots from entering a party. In the past, such people would hook up with the Constitution Party or some other extremist group. But over the last 30 years, the Republican Party has become more and more friendly ground for radicalism. Eventually, there is a critical mass of crazy where only the crazy are allowed. And that is what we now have with the Republican Party. Note: contrary to what many say, this never happened to the Democratic Party. It is possible that the party became too liberal, but it never became socialist.

I worry that events will lead to a place where the modern Republican Party is in control in Washington. But even that will cause them to implode. There is no way that the Republican Party can continue on as it has. The internal conflicts and the unending search for purity will eventually destroy it. But even under the best of circumstances, this process will be very painful for those least involved.

A couple of years ago, when I first saw the movie 9, I thought I perceived in it a new kind of dramatic structure. Having just watched it, I see now that I was wrong. The film is structured as a number of clear sequences—seven or so (I haven’t studied the film). And as such, it is a pretty typical story structure. The only notable thing about it is that, as usual for animated features, it is much more tightly structured than most films.

Regardless of all this, it is a wonderful film—the kind of story that I am naturally attracted to. And it is beautiful to look out. There is more creativity in every frame than there is in whole Hollywood films. Take, for example, the funeral of 2 where the others send his body off on a boat in a body of water. Before he is sent off, however, the others put a coin over his eyes. That’s really wonderful: sort of Norse, sort of Greek.

What is wonderful about this film is the way that it uses archetypes. It has the Intellectual, the Hero, the Inventor. My favorite (as always) is the Mystic. There is an unfortunate unwritten rule that says the Mystic has to die at the end of the second act. See, for example, Lord of the Flies. But while watching the film, I had a sad thought. These stories are filled with interesting types of people, but in real life, most people are just slight variation on the Follower. And that especially applies to our so called leaders, who have all the originality of a Benny Hill rerun (with all due respect to the man).

I know that I’m coming off as elitist here. But I don’t think I am in fact elitist. There is just something about any society (and ours most especially) that kills individuality and therefore life. It makes most men of my age far too interested in professional sports and not at all interested in movie musicals from the 1950s. But that in itself would be okay if all that specialization of interest led to a deep appreciation. But it doesn’t. I think the vast majority of baseball fans have no more understanding (and often less) than I do. And that’s just sad.

No wonder I want to hang out with animated dolls like 6 and 2 and 7 and 5 and 9. They are all so alive.

Afterword

For the record: I really like baseball. It’s about the only professional sport I enjoy watching. But even still, I would rather watch the minor leagues.